As the list grew into the dozens and hundreds, it became more cumbersome to maintain the static list, which was nothing more than the bank’s name, date of announcement, and amount of bailout. Plus, it was no longer just one bailout per company; Citigroup and Bank of America were beneficiaries of billions of dollars through a couple other programs.

So, I proposed a bailout site that would allow Paul to record the data at a more discrete level…up to that point, for example, most online lists showed that AIG had several dozen billion dollars committed to it, but not the various programs, reasons, and dates on which those allocations were made. A little anal maybe, but it gave the site the flexibility to adapt when the bailout grew to include all varieties of disbursements, including to auto parts manufacturers and mortgage servicers, as well as the money flow coming in the opposite direction, in the form of refunds and dividends.

Only in the past couple of months did Treasury finally release dividends in non-pdf form, and even then, it’s still a pain to work with (there’s no way, for example, to link the bank names in the dividends sheet to the master spreadsheet of bailouts). I would’ve thought that’d be the set of bailout data Treasury would be most eager to send out, because it’s the taxpayers’ return on investment. But, as it turns out, there is a half-empty perspective from this data (such as banks not having enough reserves to pay dividends in a timely fashion), one that would’ve been immediately obvious if the data were in a more sortable form.

ProPublica’s bailout tracking site doesn’t have much data other than the official Treasury bailout numbers; there’s all kinds of other unofficial numbers, such as how much each bank is giving out in bonuses, that people are more interested in. American University has gathered all kinds of financial health indicators for each bailout bank, too. There’s definitely much more data that PP, and other bailout trackers need to collect to provide a bigger picture of the bailout situation. But for now, I guess it’s a small victory to be one of the top starting points to find out just exactly where hundreds of billions of our taxes went to. And the why, too; Paul’s done a great job writing translations of the Treasury’s official-speak on each program.